Gabriel García Márquez was driving to Acapulco with his family when he abruptly turned the car around, abandoning their trip so he could return to his desk, after a childhood memory of touching ice suddenly sparked what would be the first line of One Hundred Years of Solitude. C.S. Lewis, on the other hand, spent decades pondering the scene that inspired The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe; he was 16 when he had a daydream of a faun carrying a bundle of parcels and an umbrella through snowy woods, though he was almost 40 before he began writing a novel based on that vision. Here are stories of the inspirations behind 50 classic works, from The Sound and the Fury, Jane Eyre, and Frankenstein to Anna Karenina, The Bell Jar, and Winnie-the-Pooh. Here too you'll discover who Edgar Allan Poe's raven really belonged to, whether Jane Austen's heartthrob Mr. Darcy actually existed, who got into mischief with a young Mark Twain, and what the real Sherlock Holmes did for a living.